Trend Micro Threat Report Highlights Cloud Security Needs

Trend Micro‘s newly released Threat Report indicates that spam e-mails are declining, but there’s a new threat worth noting: so-called “toolkits” that turn anyone with a computer into a dangerous hacker with the push of a few buttons. It’s bad news for the enterprise. But it could be good news for cloud service providers that focus on security as a service.

Here are some key findings from Trend Micro’s report, as per the press release:

Overall spam levels are down thanks to global crackdowns on the offending parties, but the US and India still took the first and second spots on the most-spammed list. Interestingly, Trend Micro is crediting India’s appearance on the list to the country’s growing presence on the Internet.

It’s not illegal to send spam in Russia — which might account for why it was the top spam generator for the fourth quarter of 2011. And Trend Micro also says that Russia was a major source of messages with malicious URLs embedded.

The top victims of malware were the U.S. and China.

Hackers are targeting smartphone users with SMS messages and e-mails that contain links to malicious code – and Google Android users are especially at risk due to the fact that the OS is both very popular and is- well, was [NOTE: Please link to Dave’s Android story from today when it’s live] – open source.

All this data comes from the 3.2 terabytes of messaging data Trend Micro claims to sift through on a daily basis. And naturally, Trend Micro is promoting their own cloud security solutions to protect users from these kinds of messaging-based attacks.

But whether you go with Trend Micro or not, it’s pretty clear by now that there’s plenty of opportunity for the savvy channel pro to leverage the cloud and reduce their customer’s eternal burden of spam.